The pace of coding on Freenet has increased dramatically since the release of the 0.7 alpha. We now have an active group of core developers working with Matthew Toseland (our full-time dev), and a growing community of developers working on third-party applications through the Freenet Client Protocol. After the rather stagnant period before the decision to switch to a darknet model, Freenet is now more active and vibrant than it has ever been.

Current estimates put the size of the darknet between 300-400 nodes, not bad for a hard-to-use alpha release, and we are seeing an average of about 50 commits per week from developers. We have 4 Google Summer of Code projects working on everything from a new load-balancing mechanism, to a cross-platform file upload and download utility (called "Thaw"), and a flexible user-friendly installer.

We have also been thinking hard about how to minimize the inherent usability challenges posed by a darknet approach, and with this in mind, have implemented support for third party applications to add and remove darknet connections via FCP. This means we can do things like write IM plugins to make it very easy to establish connections to friends.

We will also be deploying "opennet" functionality, so that users who don't need the security offered by the darknet, can just start up a node and get going immediately, as with previous versions of Freenet, but this time with the benefits of NAT circumvention and a UDP-based transport.

On the more administrative side, Florent Daignière has been a big help, setting up a bug tracker (https://bugs.freenetproject.org/), and a variety of other tools to help streamline Freenet's development process.

Its not all good news though, despite the generosity of many of our users, donations to the project have been unable to keep-up with the $2300 per month (a meager salary for a software developer in the UK) needed by Matthew Toseland, and right now we are on the verge of not being able to continue to pay him - which would obviously be terrible for the project. In the past, users and supporters of the project have been extremely generous when we have asked them to help us out of a financial hole, and I am hoping that you can be similarly generous on this occasion.

With this in mind, I would ask that you visit our donations page on the website, it can be found at: